If you are thinking of installing solar panels, don't wait.
Lyndon Rive, CEO of solar installer Solar City, says that prices for residential solar systems are climbing. Over time, they will decline. In five to seven years, he predicts solar energy will be on par with regular grid power. (Dick Swanson of SunPower has made the same prediction.)
Unfortunately, buyers right now are caught in a bind. The lingering shortage of silicon continues to keep panel prices high. Meanwhile, the subsidies are going down. Last year, California offered a rebate of $2.80 per watt, he said. This year, it's $2.20. It will go down to $1.90 next year.
Residents typically put a 3-kilowatt panel on their home.
Solar City's twist on solar installation lay in group buying. The company canvasses residential neighborhoods. When it gets 50 or so committed customers, it purchases the panels and then sends out teams of five or so installers to erect them. Volume discounts and concentrated installation leads to a reduction of about 20 percent in the overall cost, according to Rive.
Solar City recently raised $21 million. The company will use the money to build out its warehouse and hire and train people. The 12-month-old company has gone from two to over 100 employees. It concentrates on California but will expand to Colorado soon.
National chains of energy experts is a trend we wrote about. Read the dreamy article here.
Like a lot of people in the green energy business, Rive is a refugee from IT technology. He used to work at a software company called Everdream.
Germany's Schott Solar and Wacker Chemie AG have formed a joint venture to produce silicon wafers for solar cells, another sign of how the solar industry is consolidating.
Under the deal, Wacker will supply purified silicon to Schott Wacker (easily one of the more accidentally amusing company names in years). Schott Wacker will then turn the silicon into wafers and sell the wafers to Schott. Schott will then turn the wafers into solar cells. The joint venture will also sell wafer to other solar cell makers.
By 2012, the joint venture is expected to produce enough wafers to for a gigawatt worth of solar cells a year. The two companies estimate the joint venture will create 700 jobs in Germany. Total investment will come to over $500 million.
With the joint venture, Wacker effectively locks in a customer for its silicon and Schott guarantees itself a supply of silicon. In the past three years, several solar cell makers have been plagued by silicon shortages. Schott makes solar cells (as well as equipment for solar thermal plants) but has not participated in wafer manufacturing to date.
Other companies are also moving to absorb more portions of the solar cell manufacturing process as a way to reduce costs, guarantee supplies or streamline supply chains. China's Suntech Power Holdings has begun to experiment with designing its own manufacturing equipment. Not all companies, however, are following this trend.
Samsung Wafer
(Credit: Samsung)Alltel scored a coup today when it became the first carrier to offer the Samsung SCH-r510, a handset we first saw earlier this year at CTIA. Also called "The Wafer," the r510 exemplifies Samsung's overt obsession for slim phones. The candy bar cell phone, which is just 0.33 inch thin and weighs only 2.7 ounces, bears a strong resemblance to the earlier Samsung Trace for T-Mobile. Though I get the meaning behind the "Wafer" name (it's wafer thin) I can't say I like it very much. I keep thinking of a vanilla wafer.
Inside, the wafer offers a respectable feature set, including a 1.3-megapixel camera, an MP3 player, an expandable memory slot, stereo Bluetooth, and support for Alltel's new Celltop application. You can get the Wafer for $49.99 with a two-year contract.
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